Not So Funny Anymore....

Last time here, I mentioned some of the earlier influences on the kinds of comedy I still appreciate the most.  Recordings and television shows were important parts of that upbringing, but so were words and images in print.  From my teens onward, humor magazines were a big part of turning my sense of humor into the somewhat questionable pit it remains to this day.

I was not alone in being corrupted by this influence. So many icons of modern comedy, still seen on late night TV and streaming services, are direct descendants of the legacies of two publications that hit their peak in the 1970s: MAD magazine and the National Lampoon. Much of the original cast of the NBC show now (but NOT originally) known as Saturday Night Live had their first national prominence through radio and theatrical programs under the National Lampoon brand.

MAD came first, both in general and for me.  Its roots were in shock comic books of the 1950s, which became such a shock to white-bread Protestant values that Congress held hearings on their ill effects on the rising tide of juvenile delinquency.  The publisher of one such brand called "Entertaining Comics," William Gaines, got brought before a U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, where, as one piece describes it,

Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee confronted him with a gruesome comic book cover depicting a woman’s decapitated head. The two debated whether the depiction of blood on the cover was in good taste.

Much as Hollywood "voluntarily" adopted a strict code of purity during that era, comic book artists were coerced into a similar Comics Code that largely put Gaines's Entertaining Comics out of business. The name, though, survived for decades beyond that-as "EC Publications, Inc." became the formal legal entity that publishes the far funnier magazine of MADness, less often but still much beloved, to this day.

By the early 70s, I got to know the schtick a bit, as friends of mine and of family had copies of issues and of paperbacks of the magazine's features. While these were available for me to get comic contact highs off of, I didn't really get the true MAD experience until my godparents gifted me a subscription that lasted into college. That was incredibly ironic, since they were true-believer Nixon lovers, and the magazine's subversiveness flew right over their heads. 

Every issue had a parody of a current film upfront ("The Oddfather" in the first issue I ever received) and another of a popular television show of the day toward the back ("Clodumbo" and "M*A*S*H*uga" are among those I remember). In between, Dave Berg drew about the "lighter side" of everyday experiences. Don Martin re-invented the English language from AAAAGH! to ZZZGLAP. Spy went up against Spy, Sergio Aragones's doodles danced through the margins, and every politician and brand name in America was fair game. 

One constant always came near the end: an artist named Al Jaffee filled the inside back cover with a "fold in" that offered a secret message to anyone ready to mutilate the collectors' value of their issue. Here's the one from that first issue I ever got mailed:



We'll come back to that artist before we leave, but let's move over to the somewhat adulter Lampoon that came along in that same era for me.

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College humor was long a part of comedy, American and elsewhere: Monty Python's members were all part of a Cambridge troupe that even included Emma Thompson. Cornell had a long-standing humor publication called the Widow, a longtime rival of the Moar Serious Daily Sun, but it had died out by the time of my arrival. Others tried to supplant it, many also parts of the Sun staff. Most successful was the Lunatic, founded by Joey Green, who's gone on to a life of comic relief.  A less famed one was something called the Hedonist, which tried to recruit writers to their short-lived staff by holding down a table in the main student union lobby singing ♫Borrrrn, to be, Heeeee-donist!♫  But the oldest and elitist of them all in collegiate ranks is the Harvard Lampoon- founded in 1876; the haha mater of Colin and Conan and Carter, oh my!; and for a few shining decades, licensor of the Lampoon name to an off-campus magazine that took humor, particularly dark humor, and made it National.

I never subscribed, but many of the issues, or bits from them, became mainstays of my humor's development.  One cover, and one fake ad, encapsulate what went on among these eternal sophomores:





(Pre-internet, the latter got passed around for years as a well-worn Xerox copy after VW sued to make them rip the page out of half the press run.  I never owned the dog issue or even had a copy of its cover, and was sad to learn just now that the poor pup really was shot a few years later in a Vermont hunting incident.)

The magazine itself occasionally had things intended to be preserved, and I've done that with at least one of them.  Recently, a few people have posted about the board game Monopoly; one of them reminded me of NatLamp's creation of a Miracle Monopoly Cheating Kit in one of its mid-70s issues.  I still have the cutouts from that article in an envelope lovingly labeled MMCK along with the houses, hotels and (real) title deeds from the game itself.  This piece from a 2010 blogger entry preserves many of the images of it: the fake Chance and Community Chest cards-



- a few fake deeds-



- and of course some extra walkin' round money-



The blogger also mentions the two-piece insert to the Official Rullz, of the same height and in the same typeface as the real thing, which the cheater could insert in the middle of the compendium to justify all the strange things this kit bestows on you.  They were NOT able to find the "Shoot the Moon" card mentioned in tbose fake rules,  but that's because there wasn't one: it was an actual space printed for you to paste onto the board at a convenient moment:



- with rules to match-



One of the ironies that may or may not have been lost on the Lampooners is that the original game, which was stolen from the inventor of the preceding "Landlord's Game" that Parker Brothers appropriated, really DID have an alternative set of rules designed much like Shoot the Moon. That provenance was revealed in another of the recent pieces I've come across about the game's history:

The game was originally designed in 1903, by Lizzie Magie, a charismatic feminist, actor, and poet. At the time, most board games, like most novels for children, were viewed as vessels for moral instruction. Magie called her creation the Landlord’s Game, basing it on the theories of Henry George, an influential economist who argued that the value of land should be shared by the people rather than extracted by property owners. The game, which was meant to depict the evil of such owners, spread like a folktale, adopted by communities who tweaked the rules to suit their tastes and circumstances.

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By the time I got to high school, the National Lampoon  was expanding beyond periodic publication into other forms of parody. First to arrive was a dead-on spoof of your high school yearbook, my high school yearbook, EVERY high school yearbook that probably ever existed. In what must have been a side-eye shot at the torture that MAD's publisher endured, the fictional Ohio town of Dacron's high place of academia was named "C. Estes Kefauver High School." Magazine co-founder Doug Kenney, and longtime funnyman and political pundit P.J. O'Rourke, did most of the writing for the spoof, which was published in 1973 but parodied the fictional high school's 1964 yearbook.  That was the year of my sister's graduation, and I had her own copy of Resume '64 to confirm just how accurate a representation it was.  The spoof included signatures on pictures which made it to be the personal copy of one Larry Kroger '64, and a Mandy Pepperidge of that class also appears.  These names would become later parts of Lampoon lore.

A few years later, the magazine struck again, this time parodying a present-day phenomenon: a fully loaded Sunday edition of the Dacron Republican-Democrat.  This one, I did buy, and still have, in pieces laying all about the house. They include the comics section with spoofs of superhero strips (Squirrel-Man!) and activity pages (Uncle Bunk); the weekly national insert of Pomade magazine; advertising circulars for Swillmart (where quality is a slogan!) and Food Clown (milk- recent vintages!); and this front page story which continues to be a journalism trope anytime a national or international disaster has even the most minor of effects on somebody from a smallish town:



That was almost the last we heard from Dacron, except for at least two of its alumni showing up in the first film to be produced under the NatLamp banner. Larry Kroger and Mandy Pepperidge went on to Faber College, home of Animal House, and the height of the magazine's comic influence.

After that, it was downhill pretty quickly. Co-founder Kenney died at 33, the magazine went through a number of corporate-raiderish maneuvers before finally fading into what it now remains-a merch-only marketing ploy to put NATIONAL LAMPOON'S YOUR NAME HERE on whatever your stupid tits-and-vomit comedy movie idea might be.

The original Harvard one continues, as does the Cornell Lunatic. As for MAD, as I commiserated some time back, it has remained part of the AOL Time Warner Discovery DC Comics ATT YOUR NAME HERE conglomerate even since I was a subscriber, but they have been bounced around like the freckle-faced stepchild they always were there, and ended regular publication a couple of years ago.  Many of the artists and writers I grew up with have long since passed, but the last and greatest of the Usual Gang Of Idiots, the Al Jaffee I mentioned about 318 paragraphs ago, finally retired at the age of 100- and has now earned the pinnacle of his profession: a New York Times obituary:

Al Jaffee, a cartoonist who folded in when the trend in magazine publishing was to fold out, thereby creating one of Mad magazine’s most recognizable and enduring features, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 102.

His death, at a hospital, was caused by multi-system organ failure, his granddaughter Fani Thomson said.

It was in 1964 that Mr. Jaffee created the Mad Fold-In, an illustration-with-text feature on the inside of the magazine’s back cover that seemed at first glance to deliver a straightforward message. When the page was folded in thirds, however, both illustration and text were transformed into something entirely different and unexpected, often with a liberal-leaning or authority-defying message.

For instance, the fold-in from the November 2001 issue asked, “What mind-altering experience is leaving more and more people out of touch with reality?” The unfolded illustration showed a crowd of people popping and snorting various substances. But when folded, the image transformed into the Fox News anchor desk.

The obit mentions his beginnings as a first-generation son of Lithuanian immigrants; his achievement of early Fame! in the first class of the High School of Music and Art in New York; his early work in comic books with Stan Lee among his coworkers; and finally, just as Gaines was driven out of comics, to work as a freelancer at MAD for most of the next 70 years. 

His other regular MADdening feature was "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions," a trove of Borscht Belt insult comedy that was turned into many paperbacks, complete with extra cartoon balloons for you, the reader, to come up with your own. Among his one-offs, which I've thought of in recent weeks, was his visioning of an updating of America's pastime- from "baseball" to the much more marketable sport of BASEBRAWL.  The whole piece is reproduced here,  but already one of his innovations has reached the big leagues-



- the pitch clock.

And so, as I recall so many of these memories with so much fondness, I had to send Al out with one final Fold-In of my own: